rigorousintuition.ca

In the end, power is about control of access to resources. The logical end of power is the concentration of all control of access to all resources. This has never happened. The ability to control access to resources is always contested. Thus we have wars. The Wikileaks exercise, no matter who is behind it and whatever its intended purpose, is part of the contest. Even if it wasn't at first, it certainly is now.

Is anyone trying to control what information people have access to? Possibly. But more likely, someone sees the Wikileaks saga as a chance to control access to information by commercializing it. All this freely available information, user contributed content, widely distributed, is a significant decentralization of control of access to information. All this information can now be pulled out of thin air, and is produced in ever greater quantity. It is a danger to the dominant elites not because it leads to awareness or rebellion, but because it reduces the proportion of control of access to resources which they share and over which they fight in their private gentleman's game. All this internet is wonderful, they agree, but as JP Morgan famously asked of Tesla's freely available power, where do we put the meter?.

But what about Australia, where just such a plan was defeated by the early stirrings of Wikileaks? Far from me the thought of diminishing the Glory that is Australia, but the pawn is often sacrificed if the gambit yields the opposing Queen. Without its demonstrated credibility as a whistleblower site that can have a significant impact, would anyone now take Wikileaks seriously? And aren't North America and Europe worth an Australia? At least? And besides, with the Queen off the board, can the pawn really stand alone in its triumph? For how long?

More to come, about Wikileaks, China, Russia, and post-war propaganda techniques. Thanks to whoever posted the Orwell on the last page. It set me thinking.

I am not sure why, but this thread has given me the strong urge to watch the complete works of Sam Peckinpah back to back. Would that I had the time.

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Joe H and any other Australians: Is there follow-up in Oz on the story of cable revelations concerning Arbib, Gillard and Rudd? Is the Gillard government feeling any kind of heat or experiencing instability as a result? How do you think Assange would do if he stood for parliament in a friendly district?

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DrVolin, you present scenarios about possible unknown unknowns. Despite making fun of "Spidey Sense," I have no objections per se to your speculations, because they're not presented as Duff-style ironclad conclusions, and you don't seem tied to an agenda-driven view that will block out any alternative scenario. It's good to keep all the possibilities in mind, as long as you are open to all of the other possibilities and give due to evidence as it arrives.

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Nordic wrote:To me, this is boiling down to one simple question:

Why does everyone know who Julian Assange is, and nobody knows who Sibel Edmonds is?

With the first, the media coverage is over the top. With the second, it's reluctant and almost non-existent.

That's the question that everyone needs to ask in regards to Assange (the first three letters of his name are ASS) and Wikileaks.

Still? I'm on the fence. Because I don't KNOW anything.

Nordic, what do the last three letters of your six-letter screen name, which constitute a complete syllable, intone when spoken out loud? Should we consider this significant?

What does Sibel Edmonds think? Her site is at http://www.boilingfrogspost.com. First page currently features this cartoon:



You can read her posts on Wikileaks at
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/?s=wikileaks

This indicates she is a defender of Wikileaks in the same sense that I am unequivocally so: the question of free speech and the freedom to publish and read without being threatened with legal sanctions or extrajudicial death by the likes of Joe Biden and Peter King.

As of Dec. 14, she is withholding "hasty judgement" about the cables releases and questioning Wikileaks' media strategy, meaning the speed and nature of the first releases given the usual "attention curve" of the corporate media. Believe it or not, I agree with much of what she says (and you can read that further up on this thread) and in any case find her position very wise on her part.

Her last post on the subject (Dec. 16) was a criticism of the New York Times:

Sibel Edmonds wrote:I am going to stay true to my pledged position on Wikileaks related topics, and stick with questions rather than hasty analyses and interpretations. I’ve been highly puzzled by the recent position of and statements by the New York Times on Wikileaks Gate. I don’t know whether to view this puzzling change of heart and position in light of appropriately seasonal concepts of miracles, seeing the light, and the eighth wonder of the world, or, more realistically cynical interpretations based on their reputation, history and track record. How does a mindset dictating governmentally correct and approved reportage suddenly change into one that sides with transparency and positive journalistic ethics? This is when it is good to have media outlets and investigative journalists who investigate, analyze, and report on other media channels, editors and reporters. Alas, we ain’t got one; at least not one I’ve been able to find, thus, here I am with my list of questions asking you to hop on board and help me come up with possible explanations.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Times’ infamous editor, along with his superiors in the government and inferiors beneath him on the committee, decided to hold the explosive exposé on NSA’s Warrantless Spying Program. The Times held the story not for one day, not for one week, not for one month, but for over a year. It sat on it, and whether easily or with great difficulty, it sealed its every single reporter’s lips. Together, in a unified fashion, they all sat on this earth-shattering revelation. They served their masters, and threw their weight into highly critical elections. When, after it was way too late, their governmentally sanctioned deed, this journalistically unethical scam, was exposed, they didn’t have much if anything to offer as defense: (FOLLOW LINK FOR MORE)

Nordic, your question: "Why does everyone know who Julian Assange is, and nobody knows who Sibel Edmonds is?"

Sibel Edmonds was subjected to gag orders for years. In 2009, she decided to violate these and openly offered her story to the corporate media. As a result, her recollections of criminal case files she saw while during her time as an FBI translator in 2002 -- implicating the major Pentagon neocons of that time (Perle, Feith, et al.) and Denny Hastert in a ring dealing secrets including nuclear secrets to clients like Turkey and Israel -- were published in some detail by the London Times. Her media strategy produced what I would call a relative success, especially given that she did not have the documents, but could only name their identifying numbers and speak from her recollections and notes.

Her story did get out into the World Wide Web with coverage in many outlets abroad, and as a result tens of millions of people know who Sibel Edmonds is, what her story is, and where the documents that might confirm her story are to be found. The story was not picked up by US corporate media and did not make a splash in the US, which the fault of the media and not hers, or prompt a renewed investigation of the crimes she alleges, which is the fault of the US authorities and not hers, or cause outcry, protests and riots, which is the fault of our civil society including ourselves.

The differences between her case and that of Wikileaks are obvious: the documents are still unavailable, and thus she cannot force the issue by publishing these herself (or quietly passing them on to Wikileaks!). This also minimizes her ability to create a big advance PR and anticipation. Furthermore she has not had a string of prior "hits," as Wikileaks has had with Scientology, Kenya, Kaupthing in Iceland, the Australian Internet censorship list, Collateral Murder and the Iraq/Afghanistan war logs, among other stories that, like it or not, make it into the most successful investigative media organization of recent years. Also a gaping wound to the corporate media, a huge embarrassment and accusation.

Edmonds is not running an effective, international organization that has announced its intent to keep bringing out such material. While the gag orders brought attention to her case, the national security state has yet to declare her a dangerous, continuing threat that must be silenced, as they have with Wikileaks. She is not in the clutches of the legal system of two countries on, to say the least, highly suspect charges. This is probably because such attacks on her would, in her case, revive her story. For now, her story is contained and any authorities who might feel threatened by it are not going to help her get attention by applying repressive measures. In Wikileaks' case, they no longer care about that aspect, because Wikileaks already has secret goods (including, supposedly, the Bank of America documents), and is bringing them out regardless, and the whole world is already watching.

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Soon as I asked the question above of Joe, I went into the other thread (WIKI!) and saw he'd already written an answer:

Joe Hillshoist wrote:

JackRiddler wrote:And this list missed a whole bunch of the big ones, like the Yemeni-US construction of a mini-Gulf of Tonkin incident, the order to steal Ban-Ki Moon's credit card numbers, corporations like Pfizer and Shell routinely reporting their crimes in Nigeria to the State Department without fear of repercussion or loss of support, Arbib's service as an informant during the toppling of the Rudd government in Australia, pressure on Sweden and Spain among others to follow US corporate copyright policy, and and what am I forgettin'? Oh yeah, Lebanese defense minister Murr negotiating with Israel about which targets in his country he'd like to see BOMBED.

Plus the fanatic obsession with the real Axis of Evil: Iran, Hugo, and Michael Moore.

I don't think Arbib's stuff is that big a deal. I see it in the context of ... thats how relations work between Aus and the USA. These two countires and Canada are more alike than anywhere else on earth and we don't show a border with Canada so there is none of that neighbourly competition/dislike. The sort of thing Arbib did has been going on in Australia since WW2. With politicians from all sides of politics too. Cos we speak the same language and we live in former British colonies and fought the Japs together. So in some sense Australia might be more like the US than Canada. Half of us don't speak French.

The sort of stuff Arbib said would have been the sort of normal informal discussions over beers watching the cricket or footy that go on here. Having the same whinges about a dickhead cos they both have the same problems with him. Its probably not that good in terms of sovereignty or self discipline but it isn't that big a deal compared to other stuff.

Arbib said what he said a long time before Rudd fell, and honestly Rudd wouldn't have if he'd stuck to his guns on any number of things. He was elected to do something about Climate Change and didn't. When he finally pulled the plug on that the whole population didn't like him.

I think there's more interesting stuff in there than just Arbib's indiscretion.

From http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 60#p373968

The other other thread (Amazing!) has the latest published incitement to murder Assange:

seemslikeadream wrote:

EX-CIA SPOOK CALLS FOR "COVERT ACTION" VS. ASSANGE

By Sherwood Ross
opednews.com

Two writers with close ties to U.S. intelligence agencies published a shocking article Dec. 23 in The Miami Herald asserting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is "a narcissistic nut" with "blood on his hands" and President Obama should do "whatever it takes to shut down WikiLeaks." Without giving a single example of how Assange's disclosures caused blood to flow, co-authors Thomas Spencer and F. W. Rustmann warn, "No nation can operate without secrets. Unless we adopt an aggressive plan, adopt new tough laws and take immediate action---overt and covert---we face disaster." The authors go on to state the president should be joined in this suppression of the press by "Congress and our entire intelligence, military and law-enforcement communities" because "(our)lives are depending" on it. SNIP

Here: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... &start=150

JackRiddler wrote:Joe H and any other Australians: Is there follow-up in Oz on the story of cable revelations concerning Arbib, Gillard and Rudd? Is the Gillard government feeling any kind of heat or experiencing instability as a result? How do you think Assange would do if he stood for parliament in a friendly district?

The political sitaution in Australia today is freaky and bizarre.

I wish I'd been on here from the start to report the response. So far the only thing of any real interest is the relevation that KRudd had major fears and reservations about the Afghan war that he kept from the Australian public. Even that is no real surprise.

Everything else is a bit meh. There really is nothing yet that we didn't know anyway, really this confirms a lot of stuff, but most of it didn't need more confirmation. Even the Arbib revelations are nothing new. Everyone knew the splits in the ALP and the way it felt about Rudd. The real dirt is coming from elsewhere.

As for pressure ... there's actually more pressure on the Gillard govt for her and the Attorney General's initial response to the leaks and Assange, calling for his arrest despite the fact he hadn't actually broken any laws. And their refusal to offer him appropriate consular support.

Whats funny is that while Gillard and the govt were overeacting badly to the release, and appearing to sell out one of us to pander to US interests, Rudd came out and criticised the US for failing to secure the cables properly. He said the US was the only party who bore real responsibility and that wikileaks acted fairly and reasonably. This is despite the fact that the cables don't flatter Rudd, just the opposite in fact.

I think it made him look good actually. In hindsite I'm getting a bit more respect for Rudd. Not a great deal more tho. He's a man with a long term political career in mind I think.

Australia is a joke politically. mainly cos of the piss poor state of the media. the last 18 months must be like living in the US. The Gillard govt lost a 5 GW around the time of the federal election.

It clung to power with a minority govt and only because the independents who supported it couldn't possible justify an Abbot govt cos they realised how incompetent and dangerous it would be. Despite an Abbot govt being their natural political fit. (IE conservative independents rejected a conservative govt because they didn't trust it or believe it would be competent. This was in a climate where the entire media and everyone in the country was beening brainwashed into believing the Rudd/Gillard govts were incompetent beyond belief. Perhaps they were slightly but not to the extent portrayed in the media.)

One of the independents who got elected - Andrew Wilkie - is a former spook who resigned in the lead up to the Iraq War and blew the whistle on claims of Iraqi WMDs, they were a lie according to him. The others were conserative rednecks from the bush basically. Now we have a hung parliament and I think some time in the next year or two it might actually prove to be a very good thing for everyone else not the powerful. If things go well.

The wikileaks thing in Australia has been more about the bigger issues, ie the attempt to shut it up and down and the attacks on a prominent (now, cos of those attacks) Australian associated with the organsation.

A lot of the signals in the noise are about the implications of wikileaks - is this journalism?, are such massive data dumps useful or information overload and too big - their size defies meaningful analysis?, whats transparency and whats open govt and whats an invasion of privacy?. Is this really a threat to our "security"?.

Some are very relevent too - the size issue. the document I found most useful was one small document, a list with less than 1500 websites on it. That sort of information is useful because it doesn't have to be dug up. Slogging thru the war diaries to find stuff that questioned Australia's place in Afghanistan was hard work and I eventually gave up, but I did find one document worth it in the process.

No one in the media seemed to take it very far tho. The beauty of Australia is its small enough that there are really only one or two degrees of seperation between everyone so if you want you can make the media accessible - whether they act on your info is another matter. I haven't looked at the cable release yet. I hadn't been online for months, cept to play the odd video game or watch a song or two on youtube, so I didn't bother getting online to check the documents out.

Is this journalism? Well yes and no I reckon. Its certainly publishing in a manner that resembles journalism, but it isn't actually "reporting" with its inherent bias. Its provding information tho, that probably is a journalistic function in the 21st century.

The "collatoral damage" video was closer to journalism, but it was certainly biased imo. Just cos I happen to agree with those biases ...

The more I think about it the more I agree with wikileaks releasing stuff to the MSM actually. That makes sense, especially in the internet age where the MSM in its traditional forms are beginning to die off. It generates publicity and does provide crowd sourcing opportunities for everyone with access to the net and the motivation to get stuff done. People still use the MSM to reference or anchor our collective reality. Its changing sure, as new media becomes more powerful, but the MSM - the telly and newspapers are still a form of symbolic tribal campfire.

By the time I'm an old man they will nearly be gone, esp newspapers, but for now they still do what they imprinted on us. Provide a cultural reference point. I think Assange gets that and its part of his publicity plan to take advantage of it.

As far as assange in parliament ... Wilkie and Garrett (former Ois frontman) both got elected because although they had prominent other lives they focused on their local elkectorates. same with Maxine McKew, former Lateline (late night news current affairs show on the national broadcaster) host when she ran against Howard in his seat of Bennelong back in 07 and beat him. The ultimate disgrace for Howard - a sitting PM failed to be re elected in his own seat, one he'd held for over 30 years.

If Assange was to be elected he'd have to satisfy his local electorate that he'd represent them well, and that would have to be his primary committment. No more whistleblowing. If he does this whole wikileaks thing well over the next few years comes "home" and settles down then its could be a possibility.

DrVolin wrote:
But what about Australia, where just such a plan was defeated by the early stirrings of Wikileaks? Far from me the thought of diminishing the Glory that is Australia, but the pawn is often sacrificed if the gambit yields the opposing Queen. Without its demonstrated credibility as a whistleblower site that can have a significant impact, would anyone now take Wikileaks seriously?

Iceland, Kenya ... its not just us. Just "pawns" too I spose, tho they are also full of real people with real lives, and really the importance of the internet filter to us - well it pales in comparison to some people in the world with real problems. The point is everyone is wondering whats useful about wikileaks? I have found it useful.

And aren't North America and Europe worth an Australia? At least? And besides, with the Queen off the board, can the pawn really stand alone in its triumph? For how long?

Again its just the fucking internet, but ... and ultimately who cares if its a scam. While its useful use it. Whats the worse thats gonna happen? You're gonna end up dead horribly or incarcerated for your "freedom" or at least for trying to claim it? Some of the greatest people ever have had that fate it'd be no shame to share it. Many of them we'll never know about.

And the likelihood of such a future isn't that great, maybe if you're putting info up there, but if you're gonna do that you should accept nothing will gaurantee your safety beforehand.

I mean really when you look at the big picture...

If you are just arguing against making wikileaks and JA into some heroic thing they aren't - well I agree with that.

More to come, about Wikileaks, China, Russia, and post-war propaganda techniques. Thanks to whoever posted the Orwell on the last page. It set me thinking.

If its more than idle speculation I'm very interested to see/hear it.

Nordic wrote:To me, this is boiling down to one simple question:

Why does everyone know who Julian Assange is, and nobody knows who Sibel Edmonds is?

With the first, the media coverage is over the top. With the second, it's reluctant and almost non-existent.

That's the question that everyone needs to ask in regards to Assange (the first three letters of his name are ASS) and Wikileaks.

Still? I'm on the fence. Because I don't KNOW anything.

I may have gone to school with him.

If it wasn't him it was someone who was associated with him - one of those melbourne hackers. I think it was him tho cos he was the only one convicted, iirc, and it was a matter of gossip. Otherwise I wouldn't have even remembered the guy I'm thinking of. he looked a bit like him too, tho it was a long time ago. I haven't really bothered to check it out tho. JA went to something like 37 schools during his nomadic childhood, and ours had a reasonable computer dept in the 80s so it wouldn't surprise me. He also lived on a hippie commune between here and the coast (less than 50 as the crow flies, tho there's a mountain range so you have to drive around) as a kid.

This country is a small one and its easy enough to find someone who knows someone. I know people who knew some of those melbourne hackers when they were doing their thing too, according to them wikileaks being legit just fits with assanges life trajectory. That makes sense. This guy has already been villified by the media, as a teenager, he was an outsider to begin with and if he spent any time around here on a hippie commune when he was a kid he got exposed to the idea of people standing up to power.

The Terania Creek protests happened back then - the first time an environmental protest saved anything in Australia - a forest that has since become a national park, and the waterfall, an international attraction and Aboriginal sacred site is now called Protesters Falls in their honour. Its a beautiful and magical place too. Not to mention the chopper raids and harassment all the communes recieved back then from the cops and redbneck locals, especially over pot growing. But also over the greenie activism and association with local blackfellas.

Most of the people I know who were kids round here when that all happened have grown into aware active committed adults with a strong sense of ... I dunno, but basically they have a social conscience and the self belief to take stuff - anything - on and follow through with it. Its a good bunch of people and their qualities are noticeable compared to people who grew up elsewhere in Australia of the same age. Sure there are people like that everywhere, but here their number is a noticeable thing and it must have been because of the local culture.

Thats what i think about it, and most of that is based on my opinion, life experience and proximity - its not really anything other than that. I'm not really trying to convince anyone he is on the level, cos this is a place where I expect people to make up their own minds.

But thats part of why I find the idea of WL being a scam kind of funny. Given where JA came from it makes more sense that it isn't.

And why?

Whats the scam for, how does it work and more importantly what has it achieved?

Aside from the fact that the whole idea didn't appear until WL started seriously fucking with the US military basically. How does this scam/psyop work, and does it work? Whats it achieved?

JackRiddler wrote:Joe H and any other Australians: Is there follow-up in Oz on the story of cable revelations concerning Arbib, Gillard and Rudd?

I haven't read any mainstream media getting excited about Arbibs 'chats' with US spooks, but i have read a few letters-to-the-editor and heard talkback callers referring to it in bitterness or outrage. That Julia seems to have been Washingtons prefererred pick will generally lose her votes on the left, win them on the right, but i'm hopeful that the Arbib/Guillard/Rudd story will flesh out and feed a growing anti-Empire-ism here.

JackRiddler wrote: Is the Gillard government feeling any kind of heat or experiencing instability as a result?

Nope, they've got bigger problems all round.

JackRiddler wrote:How do you think Assange would do if he stood for parliament in a friendly district?

It'd have to be a pretty friendly electorate, otherwise no chance: too 'faggy'/intellectual.

JoeH wrote:.. So far the only thing of any real interest is the relevation that KRudd had major fears and reservations about the Afghan war that he kept from the Australian public. Even that is no real surprise. ..

Not a surprise, but a great barbie stopper - people can't help but agree it makes sense, but don't like the world-as-it-is it shows. I think that meme (that Rudd got rolled because he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan), if it makes it into primetime comedy/chat shows as i think it will, could be an inflection point for our relationship with US.

Joe Hillshoist wrote: But thats part of why I find the idea of WL being a scam kind of funny. Given where JA came from it makes more sense that it isn't.

And why?

Whats the scam for, how does it work and more importantly what has it achieved?

Aside from the fact that the whole idea didn't appear until WL started seriously fucking with the US military basically. How does this scam/psyop work, and does it work? Whats it achieved?

First, thanks for the background info you presented, I enjoyed the read and it explained a lot.
My speculation is that Assange/WL aren't a scam, but their opposition would very much like the American public (at least) to perceive Wikileaks that way so that the information they publish can be ignored or dismissed.

My reasoning ties into the Kazynski thread here, from over the weekend. The unabomber's manifesto was published when I was a youngster. My parents and teachers emphasized that the manifesto was published only to stop the bombings - I was taught to ignore it and refuse to read it out of disdain for the Unabomber, because a person who kills people to get his ideas across is a person who doesn't deserve to even have their ideas considered. And besides killing people for no good reason, that asshole made it so that we couldn't send a package with stamps anymore. That might not be a big deal to anyone other than my mail-impaired family - it had a remarkable effect on us because we lived far away from our (also lazy and mail-impaired) folks. I remember that the adults in my life back then spent a lot of time talking about how they ignored the manifesto. I still haven't read it and have no desire to.

So this seems to be a similar tactic to inoculate people against a meme: consider Assange a creep and Wikileaks a scam, so we can ignore what they publish with impunity. Not because what they say is false, but because they deserve to be ignored.

Yeah crickett well thats a good call. I actually meant if wikileaks is a scam what does it achieve, cos I agree completely with what you said about the way Assange is being framed. Tho I don't have the similarity of the Unabomber thing to draw on, but there's definitely that idea that he's a creep so what he publishes should be ignored coming the right of the Australian media.

At times, they are caught in a bind tho cos wikileaks helped publish the climate gate emails, and its basically a freedom of speech thing. The rape charge against Assange isn't even cut and dried - "the Saudi Arabia of Feminism" is the sort of thing our right wing commentators wish they'd thought up.

One thing about 2010 - its provided some interesting uncertainties.

wintler2 wrote:

JackRiddler wrote:How do you think Assange would do if he stood for parliament in a friendly district?

It'd have to be a pretty friendly electorate, otherwise no chance: too 'faggy'/intellectual.

Bob Brown is the definition of faggy and intellectual yet he does all right. He also had a hands on beginning to his career at the start of a cultural change in society. Tho jumping off rubber boats in the Tasmanian bush to stand up to bulldozers and angry rednecks does give people a sense of masculine strength whatever their sexuality. (Bob brown, leader of the Australian Greens and Grand Old Man of the Australian Senate is an openly gay man.) In that sense Assange is similar but hasn't done the "in the bush thing".

I can see Assange fulfilling a similar role if information freedom and modern comms became a big enough political issue in Australia, after thinking about it for a bit.

The senate and the house of reps are two different things, the senate is an upper house and reviews the legislation the lower house makes. The lower house majority is the basis of govt, and is made up of locally elected reps with a majority forming govt. the upper house began as a "states house" a place where the states interests could be defended against the power of the federal govt. Thats changed over time as the states have become less important wrt political identity. We're all Australians first, and from the state we live in second these days.

Upshot is its easier to get elected to the senate cos the whole state gets a say on who is elected. That means you can get elected to the senate if you get a proportion of the overall vote.

If 10 - 20 percent of people in every electorate vote green then its unlikely any green reps will get elected in any seat, this is inherently unfair wrt representation as no greens in parliament. However if the same proportion also vote green in the senate then roughly that proportion of green senators will get elected. Its not perfect, far from it, but its a sense of balance thats evolved in the system.

Of course the details are a little more complicated than that but thats enough of an overview.

Upshot - Assange is unlikely to ever get elected as a rep, cept as an independent if he makes the effort locally. But in the right circumstances he could get elected to the senate, and given the way the senate usually pans out he'd probably end up with more power there.

JoeH wrote:.. So far the only thing of any real interest is the relevation that KRudd had major fears and reservations about the Afghan war that he kept from the Australian public. Even that is no real surprise. ..

Not a surprise, but a great barbie stopper - people can't help but agree it makes sense, but don't like the world-as-it-is it shows. I think that meme (that Rudd got rolled because he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan), if it makes it into primetime comedy/chat shows as i think it will, could be an inflection point for our relationship with US.

Its definitely a meme worth pushing.

So far the cables have been used to reinforce the idea that Rudd was a control freak who was always going to be dumped by the party. That suits the murdoch narrative which dominates the country now (more than ever.)

I still reckon his failure on getting action on Climate Change, and his hammering wrt taxing big mining companies was what ended him, and if he had suceeded at the first he would have at the second. Once he failed at the second he was gone tho.

But it has a bit of merit as an idea, and the subtext is there. Its not the whole story but should be brought into focus cos since Rudd has gone the coverage of the war has been alot more in its favour, maybe thats also a response to the War Diary release tho.

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Apparently the Bank of America site was intermittently DDOSed today.

According to "Blogging Wikileaks" at The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/157333/bl ... day-day-30

which brings following set of different items (links are in original) :

10:50 Does Ron Paul regret his strong (and rare) backing for WikiLeaks early on? New interview with National Revliew folks shows he is standing by it, maybe more so. "This can’t be allowed to go without a full debate. If you don’t protect the rights that we have to broadcast and print — as well as for individuals who want to tell the truth about our government — we’re in big trouble" Not so keen on Manning, though.

8:50 Glenn Greenwald debating Fran Townsend (and host) on CNN tonite.

7:50 Good piece by noted author / columnist Richard Reeves (like me, he's written a book about Nixon) on Wikileaks as the #1 "game changer" of 2010. Yeah, others will pick something else as "top story" but game-changing is what really counts.

5:55 Should be fun: Glenn Greenwald on CNN tonite at about 7 with former Bushie, Fran Townsend.

5:35 If you're wondering about the right's response to Bradley Manning treatment, Glenn Greenwald and more, here's Powerline.

5:30 With little help now from NYT and Guardian, WikiLeaks has become WikiDrips, latest count still just short of 2000 published.

4:55 Capping day on Wired / Manning front (see below), a fun parody for "Hired" magazine cover. [below]

3:55 Huff Post's Ryan Grim notes NYT publishing cable on Karzai releasing drug dealers. "President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly released well-connected officials convicted of or charged with drug trafficking in Afghanistan, frustrating efforts to combat corruption and providing additional evidence that the United States' top ally in the country is himself corrupt."

2:45 Robert Mackey at NYT blog reports on Assange book deal, and as often true with Times coverage of WikiLeaks the past few weeks, adds nothing to what's known.

2:30 Glenn Greenwald updates his blast at Wired from this morning: "Evan Hansen, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired.com, says on Twitter that Poulsen is 'on vacation'' but that Wired will post a response to this article tomorrow."

2:15 Still mixed reports on partial BOA outage. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis tweets: "The better retribution on BofA is a leak, not an attack."

2:10 Fox: U.S. apologizes to Peru over leaked cables that report on leader's affairs, ego, manic-depression and ties to drug lords.

1:35 Report from my tweeps: BOA site not loading at all for some, loading all the time for many others, some (like me) in-between. Jeff Jarvis, for one, tweets in response to my query at 1:35: "Dead to me." Then, two minutes later, says it's "resurrected." This seems to be common experience.

12:55 Fire Dog Lake's valuable "merged" version of Manning-Lamo Chat Logs

12:40 BOA site usually loads for me this past hour but occasonally...not.

12:10 Bank of America cyber attack allegedly underway now since noon. Here's their running timer on how long since began. Twitter feed: @Anony.Ops. Hashtags seem to be #operationBOA and #payback

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JackRiddler wrote:.

7:50 Good piece by noted author / columnist Richard Reeves (like me, he's written a book about Nixon) on Wikileaks as the #1 "game changer" of 2010. Yeah, others will pick something else as "top story" but game-changing is what really counts.

That was a pretty good read - Reeves posits that organizations will downsize in response to ubiquitous leakage:

Game Changer

Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government.

*snip*

Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered. In a decade or two, we may not only see USAID spun off from the State Department. We may see dozens of mini-State Departments servicing separate regions of the world. Or hundreds of micro-State Departments—one for every country on the planet. Don’t like the stranglehold that a handful of megabanks have on the financial sector? Don’t worry! Twenty years from now there won’t be such a thing as megabanks, because the cost of employing 100,000 potential leakers will be prohibitive.

*snip*

That leaves these organizations with two options. The first is to tighten their security so as to disrupt or deter leaking. As it happens, some of the most brilliant minds in computer programming are hard at work on this problem. Unfortunately, as no less an authority than Zuckerberg has pointed out, these efforts are doomed to fail. “Technology”—which is to say, the technology that moves information rather than blocks it—“usually wins with these things,” he told Time’s Lev Grossman (inadvertently advancing the case for Assange as Person of the Year).

The second option is to shrink. I have no idea what size organization is optimal for preventing leaks, but, presumably, it should be small enough to avoid wide-scale alienation, which clearly excludes big bureaucracies. Ideally, you’d want to stay small enough to preserve a sense of community, so that people’s ties to one another and the leadership act as a powerful check against leaking.

*snip*

Some hacker perspective here:

vRRitti.com, providing sentiency
WikiLeaks co-producer Rop Gonggrijp’s speech at the Chaos Computer Club conference: “The possible ramifications of WikiLeaks managed to scare the bejezus out of me. Courage is contagious, my ass”

Posted in Uncategorized by vRRitti.com on 2010/12/27

Highlights:

* It is clear to many more people today than in 2005 that the world is headed for turbulent times and that this perfect storm is still very much out there. But obviously the fight over privacy is still ongoing, so in that sense we were wrong: we did not lose the war, at least not completely and not everywhere.

* The Netherlands used to be a country like Sweden or Denmark. Then it was a country like Germany for a bit in the nineties and after a confusing period with political murders and truly insane political developments we are now approaching England. I’m still guessing we’ll level out before we reach Italy, but it really is becoming hard to tell.

* Maybe we should not have been so negative. But in the 17 years before “We lost the war” I did bring a lot of my amazement, joy and positive outcomes to Congress, for instance phone phreaking, pager receivers, XS4ALL and the fight against Scientology. And I did so afterwards as well with the whole voting machine episode.

* I am probably blessed with a mild form of bipolarism. I don’t really get clinically depressed. I don’t stay in bed for weeks, nor do I contemplate suicide. But I do have my ups and downs and around 2005 this came together with my mid-life crisis and I was mighty grumpy and pissed off. Sure there were personal factors, but the situation in the Netherlands and the world was part of the problem. This did get to a point where more and more people were telling me to see a doctor. They told me: “There are pills to make you happy again you know…”

* One of the positive suggestions we did offer in “We lost the war” was to focus on battles that could be won. If I had I listened to all these other people around me, I would have been taking Prozac or Zoloft in 2005. My life would have been different and possibly much happier, especially in the short term. But a lot of things that happened to me since then would probably not have happened, because they involve me being angry and attempting to do something about it.

* I probably travelled more in the last year and a half than I did in the ten years before that. It started October of 2009, when Julian Assange and myself were keynote speakers at the Hack In The Box hacker conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We subsequently spent a month in the sun traveling Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia and we got to know each other pretty well. A month or two after, at the previous congress, WikiLeaks was still a relatively obscure geeky but gutsy journalism project.

Julian and Daniel got a standing ovation while they stood on this stage speaking about WikiLeaks and about new opportunities for protecting freedom of the press in Iceland. Three weeks later, I was was in Reykjavik with them and others to help write the proposal for IMMI, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. Then I was home for a week before leaving for India to speak on voting machines. Then I was home for three weeks before leaving for Iceland again, this time to help out on releasing the now famous Iraqi helicopter video. This was not planned: I read the WikiLeaks twitter feed, concluded that Julian needed help so I flew out a few hours later. I stayed for two very hectic weeks, helped produce the video and travelled with Julian to a press conference in Washington.

* So I helped WikiLeaks release the video. After that, I needed to get back to my e-Voting related work, but I could have stuck around helping WikiLeaks also. They could probably have used me when they released the war diaries or these cables. That did not happen. I guess I could make up all sorts of stories about how I disagreed with people or decisions, but the truth is that in the period that I helped out, the possible ramifications of WikiLeaks managed to scare the bejezus out of me. Courage is contagious, my ass.

I wish Julian and his people well, but I can’t live a life out of a backpack while on the run. Not to mention the fact that Julian has better hair and does much better soundbites.

* Some of my friends have said Julian has “angered the Gods”, Bruce Sterling recently accused him of “weeing all over the third rail” and a good friend of mine said Julian was committing “suicide by cop”. Whatever we make of it, present anger and fear at governments over WikiLeaks will probably up the pressure to curb internet freedoms.

Whether connected to WikiLeaks or not: Cryptowars 2.0 has just been announced. There’s a new American proposal to make all providers of any kind of online service provide the authorities with cleartext of everything that happens. As a result of WikiLeaks, authorities the world over will probably try even harder to clamp down on internet freedom, so organizations resisting this will have to work harder also.

* The fact that politicians are generally helpless in terms of public policy doesn’t mean to say I think they are stupid. They do have a vague sense of what might be coming and they’re acting accordingly. To judge their efficiency take a good look at the remaining public funds and public infrastructure and see who owns it in 5 years time. Our leaders are reassuring us that the ship will certainly survive the growing storm. But on closer inspection they are either quietly pocketing the silverware or discreetly making their way to the lifeboats. Even politicians that are the exception, ones that “get it” and that want to help get us out of this mess are increasingly indistinguishable from those that just pretend. We will have to learn to navigate a world in which every imaginable aspect of being genuine or sincere has 10.000 spindoctors working on how to transplant it to the fake turds that run things. Now this all sounds really smug. Like we, the hackers, the geeks, somehow have all the answers. We don’t. But we do have some important parts.

* Apple, Google, Facebook and the more geographically challenged traditional governments will try to make all of humanity enter their remaining secrets, they’ll try to make attribution of every bit on the internet a part of the switch to IPv6, they’ll further lock us out of our own hardware and they’ll eventually attempt to kill privacy and anonymity altogether.

* We’re not called Chaos Computer Club because we cause chaos. If anything, a lot of our collective work has actually prevented chaos by pointing out that maybe we should lay some decent virtual foundations before we build any more virtual skyscrapers. Wau Holland explained the name to me: he felt there was universal validity in a set of -then rather new- theories that explained complex systems and behavior from random events and very few very simple rules. This helped him explain a lot of how the world worked and how one could navigate a future a la ‘shock wave rider’. We may not cause chaos, but we do understand some small part of how chaos works, and we have been able to help others deal with it better. As this world becomes more chaotic and ad-hoc, we can help.

* Anthropologist Margaret Mead once famously said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

My keynote at 27C3

This bit didn't make the cut:

But regarding WikiLeaks we also need to calm down a bit. There’s obviously some very big things going on here that we need to keep watching intently. But just because we like or share some of the principles at stake here doesn’t mean our community is all of a sudden drawn into a war with a ridiculously well-armed superpower or with anyone else.

Whatever our role is, it is certainly not to deny freedom of speech to people or organizations who don’t like freedom of speech. This whole Anonymous thing is so getting on my nerves. People ask me “Anonymous… That is the hackers striking back, right?” And then I have to explain that unlike Anonymous, people in this community would probably not issue press release with our real names in the PDF metadata. And that if this community were to get involved, the targets would probably be offline more often.

This is a mental maturity issue: our community has generally succeeded in giving black belts in computer security karate only to people that have proven a certain level of mental maturity. Yes, some of us could probably do some real damage to Paypal and Mastercard. But then we also understand that no good comes from that. If the unlikely event that someone here has not yet reached this level of maturity, please do not connect your machine to the network and talk to some of the other people here for additional perspective.

On the positive side, some of the issues we care about are going to be getting lots of attention, and this attention can be used for good if we keep our wits about us.

And I finally have cellphone coverage in my office downstairs.

Looking at today

As we enter uncharted terrain, we are the first generation in a long time to see our leaders in a state of more or less complete helplessness. Most of today’s politicians realize that nobody in their ministry or any of their expensive consultants can tell them what is going on anymore. They have a steering wheel in their hands without a clue what – if anything – it is connected to. Meanwhile the brakes are all worn out and the windy road at the bottom of the hill approaches. Politics is becoming more and more the act of looking at least slightly relaxed while silently praying the accident will happen sometime after your term is up.

http://rop.gonggri.jp/?p=438

Two observations from that describe aspects of the probable future that were on their way regardless, but do not yet rate as certainties:

* The fact that politicians are generally helpless in terms of public policy doesn’t mean to say I think they are stupid. They do have a vague sense of what might be coming and they’re acting accordingly. To judge their efficiency take a good look at the remaining public funds and public infrastructure and see who owns it in 5 years time. Our leaders are reassuring us that the ship will certainly survive the growing storm. But on closer inspection they are either quietly pocketing the silverware or discreetly making their way to the lifeboats.

SNIP

* Apple, Google, Facebook and the more geographically challenged traditional governments will try to make all of humanity enter their remaining secrets, they’ll try to make attribution of every bit on the internet a part of the switch to IPv6, they’ll further lock us out of our own hardware and they’ll eventually attempt to kill privacy and anonymity altogether.

What a contrast to the Pollyanna stuff from TNR. The end of Big Everything may be on the way, but not without a disaster or a big fight. It won't be a gift from the technology.

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